a legacy for Tao - VI

Change of Season

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Learning and Evolution as Mental Processes

The question of teleology (design) brings me back to the final chapter of Mind and Nature (1979), in which Gregory talks about the “two great stochastic processes” that combine randomness with selectivity. Having in many different ways, in the course of that book, discussed the mind-like properties of natural systems, he compares evolution with learning. And it strikes me today that he is saying that of course there is something that looks like intelligent design in evolution, because the mind-like properties of systems are unfolding. In this sense one can see mind at work in the structure of the eye, or in the structure of the cell and what have you. But in this understanding the mind is not external. Mind is a characteristic of the unfolding organization and process, immanent and emergent.

When Gregory spoke about the two great stochastic processes – learning, involving trial and error and involving something like reinforcement to determine what is retained, and evolution, where natural selection has the same effect, he was proposing yet another aspect of the pattern which connects all living things, recognizing in our own mental processes of thought and learning a pattern which connects us to the biosphere rather than an argument for separation. This recognition is inhibited by the dualistic assumption that what happens in the natural world is mechanical. It is inhibited in a deep way by the Cartesian body – mind distinction, as if the natural world were purely material instead of being shaped by process and organization. Having over simplified our description of the natural world, we open the door to a compensatory leap from the recognition of the complexity around us to the insistence on a mind external to it – a deity – shaping it. “Miracles,” said Gregory, “are dreams and imaginings whereby materialists hope to escape from their materialism.”

a legacy for Tao - V

meta-Tao borders and pores

Artists Without Borders

The next metapattern introduced by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are borders and pores, complementary structures which on one side separe and divide, on the other allow contact and exchange; together they control and regulate the flow and exchange of materials, energy or information:

Coloured SEM image of an open stoma on a leaf

Background

Borders involve the concepts of protection, separation of inside from outside, containment, and barrier or obstacle. With pores, borders regulate the flow and exchange of materials, energy, or information. Small pores heighten regulation and reduce flow, while larger pores decrease regulation and increase flow. Borders can be visible entities, fuzzy, or invisible. Physical borders tend to be built of sheets of repeating parts (clonons).

Examples

• In science: cell membranes and osmosis, skin and pores, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, stomata, the Earth’s crust and volcanoes, clouds with fuzzy borders, atmosphere, ecotones, edge of a pond, etc.
• In architecture and design: walls with doors and windows, roof and skylight, etc.
• In art: depicted forms, frame with canvas as opening pore to another world, pottery bowl or vase with circular pore, etc.
• In social sciences: personal space, psychological and social obstacles, problem as border with paths to solutions as pores, physical space divisions and openings, social barriers, borders between social strata, racism and other biases as barriers, propaganda as a barrier to truth, borders between countries with border crossings and immigration pores, etc.
• In other senses: borders and openings in feng shui, borders between properties, airline security, etc.

Red Fort, Agra

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

a legacy for Tao - V

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

The Intelligent Design Debate

We are still troubled by the invocation of deity to explain living systems. Most natural scientists devoutly try to avoid teleological language to this day. In the United States, however, we are seeing another of the waves of religious revival that have occurred in American history, which is shaping American policy in disturbing ways. Much of it looks absurd from Europe: absurd that the Americans were preoccupied with the sex life of a president and even more absurd that we are now debating yet again whether evolution should be taught in schools, or if mentioned whether it should be treated as scientific knowledge – that is to say, what metamessage children should be given about the nature of what they are being taught, including whether it should be presented as one of several alternatives.

President Bush, earlier this summer, said in a press conference that he believes Intelligent Design should be taught in all schools. I.D. is not quite Creationism, but is very similar, because of the suggestion that the complexity and apparent purposefulness of organs such as the eye can only be explained by postulating a designer shaping his creations toward particular ends.

Intelligent Design, of course, takes off from William Paley (1794), whom Darwin and, two generations later, Gregory read at Cambridge. Paley argued that just as, when you look at a watch, you can recognize that it is designed and made by someone for a purpose, so too you can look at the natural world and infer the existence of a creator. The advocates of Intelligent Design do not insist that it all happened in seven days and they don’t insist that species don’t change over time and so on, but still they see a need for an outside intelligence. They make an effort to present their ideas with the style and format we associate with science, thereby mislabeling their message, and at the same time try to label the accumulated evidence for evolution as speculative.

a legacy for Tao - IV

meta-Tao holons

The next metapattern discussed by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are holons, a term intruced by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine of 1967, and later in Janus: A Summing Up of 1978. In the original definition of Koestler:

1. The holon

1.1 The organism in its structural aspect is not an aggregation of elementary parts, and in its functional aspects not a chain of elementary units of behaviour.

1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.

1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.

1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the "Janus phenomenon".

1.5 More generally, the term "holon" may be applied to any stable biological or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behaviour and/or structural Gestalt-constancy. Thus organelles and homologous organs are evolutionary holons; morphogenetic fields are ontogenetic holons; the ethologist's "fixed action-patterns" and the sub-routines of acquired skills are behavioural holons; phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases are linguistic holons; individuals, families, tribes, nations are social holons.

Holons are therefore - like clonons - intrinsic parts, composed of other subsystems - generally other holons -, of a holarchy of a complex system, at the same time parts (components) and wholes (levels) of the system. They differ from clonons since functionally and structurally distinguishable among them. The typical example are atoms, distinct holons made by three fundamental types (protons, neutrons ed electrons) of clonons particles. Another example from the point of view of organised structures are holons levels which progressively lead from the individual level to the global one:

Background

Holon, as mentioned previously, refers to a whole, which is often comprised of clonon parts or sets of clonon parts. Holons themselves can become clonons of even greater wholes. The idea of holons (in contrast to indistinguishable clonons) is that holons are functionally and structurally distinct parts on the level of a holarchy. Holons are like organs, on different scales of wholes. Thus the body’s holons are heart, lungs, brain, and so forth, which themselves are composed of many clonons, the relatively indistinguishable heart cells, liver cells, and so forth.

Examples

• In science: a planet, a solar system (made of holons-planets that become clonons of the solar system), an atom is a holon of three fundamental types of clonon particles, atoms become clonons of larger holon molecules, etc.
• In architecture and design: buildings, a community, etc.
• In art: subjects, figures formed from points or strokes, a sculpture, etc
• In social sciences: a concept, a community or society, an action holon of component clonon actions, a family, a class of students, etc.
• In other senses: a wall or fence, an archway made of stone clonons, a gang or clique, etc.

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The Pattern Underground

a legacy for Tao - IV

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken called Hieronymus Bosch, the Master of Hertogenbosch
Ship of Fools
oil on wood, 1494
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson and Religion

Gregory used to quote Kipling’s lines, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.”. That is, I think, a fairly interesting way of talking about religion: to say that there is something that human religions are trying to get at that matters. And they get at some of it in many different ways which include vast amounts of nonsense, much of it dangerous, but we perhaps do not yet have a better way of getting at it, whatever it is. For Gregory, that something could be approached by describing mind in cybernetic terms and recognized aesthetically in the similarities of living systems, the pattern that connects.

Gregory was profoundly ambivalent about what we generally call religion, but deeply concerned with the alienation created by the Cartesian mind–body partition that has been so liberating for science and yet leads to a whole series of isomorphic dualisms separating the sacred from the secular and our species from the rest of nature . He said that he “had always hated muddle-headedness and always thought it was a necessary condition for religion”. He grew up exposed to religious texts, reading the Bible in order – it was hoped – to avoid “empty-headed atheism”, and exposed to the art that surrounds religion, great master drawings and above all the works of William Blake collected by his father. There was an extraordinary Blake water color of “Satan Exulting over Eve” hanging in the dining room in his childhood (now in the Tate Gallery in London).

According to David Lipset, William Bateson, the pioneering geneticist who was Gregory’s father, was not a great student of the prophetic books of Blake – but Gregory went on to read them and other religious texts and poetry, puzzling over the content as well as the aesthetic value. Gregory grew up in a family that sturdily insisted that orthodox religion was nonsense, and at the same time he was stimulated by exposure to religious images, metaphors and poetry that demanded a different kind of understanding.

Gregory planned the book that became Angels Fear to discuss religion and aesthetics as ways of knowing that might prove to be indispensable to human survival and to that recognition of the larger interactive system of the biosphere he called wisdom. “The sacred (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the beautiful (whatever that means)”. For him, as a scientist, to begin to talk about religion and aesthetics was to step onto dangerous ground – Where Angels Fear to Tread – places he felt it was essential to venture, but where he was going to get into trouble with his colleagues, and he knew it. Yet the exclusion of certain ideas – the Cartesian partition of ways of knowing – seemed to him damaging.

- detail -

a legacy for Tao - III

meta-Tao clonons

The next metapattern discussed by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are clonons, physical or mental components intrinsic in a holarchy. The main characteristic is their sameness, due to the replication-cloning process. The typical example are cells which, replicating, may form supra-systems with holarchies such tissues and organs. The analogy is that of bricks used as elements to build walls and structures increasingly complex, but always formed by the same identical elements.

Detail of decoration on the Taj Mahal, Agra, India (Photo: David Castor)

Background

The notion of clonons falls within the scope of holarchies, in that specific objects or ideas are repeated to create layers of embeddedness. As with the process of cloning, a specific object can be replicated. Clonons can build wholes and each whole can be a clonon of larger set.

Examples

• In science: identical cells in different layers of tissue, protons, neutrons, electrons, worker ants, each fish in a school, identical atoms in a molecule (e.g., two clonons of hydrogen joining a holon of oxygen to form a holon of a water molecule, which in turn become a clonon of water molecules in a cup of water), etc
• In architecture and design: bricks in a wall, tiles on a floor or ceiling, each light fixture in ceiling, each office or room on a floor, each floor in a building, windows in skyscraper, each house in a subdivision, etc.
• In art: each brush stroke in a painting, each decorative design unit in a pottery bowl, each point in a pointillism painting, etc.
• In social sciences: each individual in a community or society, each client in a business, each factory worker at a specific point in an assembly line, etc.
• In other senses: each tomato on a tomato plant, each tomato plant in a tomato garden, etc.

Corporate colones; Dale O'Dell

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a legacy for Tao - III

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Kinds of Messages

I am going to start with a story that deals with the relationship between scientific and other kinds of discourse. As Gregory asserted, “… thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests and sea anemones”. In the early 80s, I was teaching a course in the anthropology department of an elite American college, Amherst College, with the title “Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East,” and I showed a documentary film of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

(Parenthetically, many readers will remember Gregory’s story about Sol Tax and the question of whether it was appropriate to film a ceremony of the Native American Church in order to defend the sacramental use of peyote, so it is important to note here that although it is forbidden for any non-Muslim to make the Meccan pilgrimage or to enter the Holy Cities, there are a number of documentary films made by Muslim film makers. I don’t believe that the issue in the Sol Tax story is the use of technology. I think the issue is the conscious use by believers of words and actions ostensibly directed toward spiritual beings to direct an argument toward political authorities, a behavior which is fairly routine in American politics. Many ethnographers have filmed rituals, including Gregory, who is still regarded as a pioneer of visual anthropology and of the use of film to record and analyze patterns of behavior. It is an oversimplification to focus on the technology per se as a desecration. The question is what is said and enacted, to whom, and in what context.)

In any case, I showed in my classroom a film of the Meccan pilgrimage, and after the class a young woman from an evangelical Christian background came up to me, with tears running down her face, and said to me, “It never occurred to me that they believed their religion.” This was, to me, a very shocking thing to hear, so I want you to pause and be shocked for a moment, before I try to unpack her statement. In fact, I think she misstated her reaction – but at the same time, she revealed a fundamental misconception in all the Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – which continues to give us trouble to this day and has indeed become more severe. What she intended to say was not that she had thought Muslims were lying when they affirmed their religion. I think that what she meant was, “It never occurred to me that their experience of their religion was comparable to my experience of mine.” The medium of film had allowed her to empathize with an experience and recognize it in an unfamiliar and exotic context.

Gregory would have pointed out that we are mammals and that we respond in terms of relationships. But of course, this young woman had been brought up with the idea that religion is about beliefs that are either true or untrue, not about experience or about relationship. Christianity and Islam have both, at different times in their history, been preoccupied with accuracy of interpretation, avoidance of heresy, and the insistence that believers should concur on specific beliefs. They have asserted that the “truths” of different religions are mutually exclusive and in competition, what I sometimes call zero sum truth. My student erred in her understanding of the kind of message communicated in religious discourse. The classification of kinds of messages occurs at a different logical level from the message itself, and often contextually. Thus, for those familiar with theater, words spoken in the context of a theatrical performance are responded to differently from the same words spoken elsewhere.

We are constantly dealing with communication at multiple levels, where some kind of metamessage classifies a particular communication as report or speculation, humor or poetry, or, in the case of Gregory’s film about river otters, combat or play. Without this level of understanding, interpretation is impossible. Gregory’s interest in the ways in which messages are modified by context and by other messages, which was elaborated in the application of the Russellian theory of logical types to schizophrenia, became fundamental to his thinking about all biological communication including that involved in epigenesis. But back to Abraham, who must have been a fairly literal-minded chap – a bit like the schizophrenic Gregory spoke about, who eats the menu card instead of the dinner. At some level – assuming that any of this happened, of course – Abraham took the admonition: “You must be willing to give all that is most precious to you to god” literally. And off he went with a sharp knife to sacrifice his son.

a legacy for Tao - II

holarchies meta-Tao

The next metapattern studied by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are Holarchies, a word coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, from a combination of the greek words "holos", meaning "whole", and "hierarchy". It is a hierarchically organized structure of units or entities that are called 'Holons' and "Clonons", elements which are both parts of a system and "wholes", useful to describe highly complex systems. A system or organization which has in its structure (or meta-structure) some holarchies it is also called holonomic or holonic.

Background

A holarchy is a nested system of layers in which the units (wholes) within one layer are parts for the wholes in the next larger, encompassing layer. Holarchic layers can be used to describe certain types of social, political, and institutional organizations, as well as structures in science and other disciplines. In holarchies the wholes at each level have particular kinds of relationships with the other wholes on that same level, and these relationships change as we move up the nested layers from physics to organisms to social systems. The relationships between layers in holarchies tend to be ambiguous and more difficult to describe.

Examples

• In science: rose flowers, the Earth and atmosphere, atoms, bodies of organisms, holarchic layers of complexity in organisms (from DNA/RNA components to the whole), solar system, galaxies, etc.
• In architecture and design: some building and community designs, etc.
• In art: forms as depicted, etc.
• In social sciences: communities (as described by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger), many tribal societies, democracy in its purest form, etc.
• In other senses: mandalas, apprenticeships, etc.

A classical example of holarchy is the hierarchy of levels of entities which compose an ecosystem:

© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram

The hierarchical structure of natural sciences and of knowledge domains is more precisely an holarchy, since it is a hierarchy but where the elements of the levels are themselves parts for the higher levels and wholes for the lower levels.

Example of holonic organization evolution in holarchic structures increasingly complex.

Example of an holonic organization community represented as a strategic map:
Lawrence Boys and Girls Club
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram

Holarchies may be also "abstract", for example a rule holarchy to determine specific results or behaviors. A relevant example are complex adaptive systems, like living systems  (if survived), where the system evolution is determined by an intrinsic holarchy of rules:

Complex adaptive system model. The evolution of the system from initial to final components, from left to right, is ruled by a central rule system organized as holarchy.
© copyright 2012 Marshall Clemens - Idiagram - NECSI

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

a legacy for Tao - II

Tree Mind, Storm Thorgerson

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson as a Scientist

Today I want to discuss these issues in relation to Angels Fear, the volume that I completed after Gregory’s death, which he saw as his most daring approach to the conventional limits of scientific attention. I inherited the task of dealing with Gregory’s intellectual legacy, as well as the intellectual legacy of my mother, Margaret Mead, and several other scholars for whose work she became responsible along the way, so I have had considerable opportunity to think about how to treat such material. It may be that having a multiple responsibility has shaped my approach – but I decided very early on that I was not going to accept the position of Anna Freud, a woman of undoubted brilliance and conscientiousness, who became protector and arbiter of orthodoxy for the work of her father, Sigmund Freud. The creation of an orthodoxy around Freud’s work was a misapprehension of the way he wove ideas and of the way he developed and expressed them, which has had a negative effect on psychoanalysis. Nowadays in the United States, Freud’s writings seem to be read primarily in literature departments, free from the pressure to maintain an orthodox interpretation, but with little concern for their ongoing scientific usefulness.

Our responsibility, I believe, in reading Gregory Bateson as a scientist, is to avoid the impulse to orthodoxy that is antithetical to science and to find a pathway through the unorthodoxy of his expression. Gregory’s writings offer a way of looking at phenomena that is grounded in science and suggests interesting and important questions. He hoped that he might address some of the ways in which scientific explanation inspires technological exploitation but fails to inspire behaviors that might, for instance, preserve species diversity and slow climate change. The “pattern which connects”  proposes not only similarity but identification – even empathy.

At the same time, unearthing the value in this work and integrating it with ongoing thinking in anthropology, biology, and psychiatry can be daunting. Often what we see in Gregory’s work is an uncompleted process, where he himself was still groping for the next step in his phrasing. The challenge is not so much to stand guard over the exact words but to continue to develop and test the thought. This is the challenge I had to deal with in putting together Angels Fear, selecting from a stack of manuscripts that only vaguely fit together and did not reach the goal he was searching for, so that it was important, as I wrote additional material, to preserve the tentativeness of it. For instance, I am convinced that Gregory’s “metalogues” gave him a literary device for exploring ideas without committing himself to the structured exposition that a more usual form of essay would have required. The metalogues, by their fluidity, proclaim the search that was still in flux. Although some parts of the metalogues did actually happen, and although I imitated them sometimes in actual conversation with Gregory and have written some since, they are a form of fiction.

a legacy for Tao - I

meta-Tao hierarchies

The fourth metapattern introduced by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are hierarchies (from greek ἱεραρχία, ierarchia, derived of hierárkhēs, composed of hieros "sacred" and árkhō "leader", therefore with the overall meaning of "leader of sacred rites"), conceptual structures which define relations among layers, sheets, groups of elements and levels of a system; the most known type of hierarchical structure is the pyramid-like, where the system description levels and the information flows are suitably represented in a vertical structure, typically used in organizations.

In the case of socio-cultural systems, insofar a pyramidal structure is perceived by the involved subjects, some myths are established such "control" and "power":

and related concepts such leadership:

Pyramid-type hierarchies commonly used have the characteristic that the related vertical levels have homogeneous elements, for example they contain always persons, even if with different roles and functions. The Russellian hierarchy of logical types instead shows a logical gap between levels and metalevels, applied for example by Bateson to the logical categories of learning and communication, and found also in description hierarchies where there is a logical dishomogeneity between levels, for example in the case of the transition from physical-chemical levels of the natural sciences to the higher of life and of emergent phenomena in complex systems. The pyramidal hierarchies are not the only possible; for the description of several conceptual systems categorizations of transversal or lateral type may be useful.

Background

Hierarchies tend to be depicted as pyramidal arrangements of sheets. Hierarchies are identified as the relationships between layers become evident. In most cases, hierarchies are exemplified by power or control moving downward. In other cases, the top layers may indicate greater importance or significance. Information, materials, or energy move upward. They tend to create stratified stability. However, this stability may depend upon the types of binary relationships and other patterns that are created within the overall structure.

Examples

• In science: trophic layers, phylogenetic trees, animal societies (bees, ants, chimpanzees, wolves), etc.
• In architecture and design: pyramids, building design and layout, etc.
• In art: as form, etc.
• In social sciences: governmental and organizational structures; classrooms, schools and schooling; some learning theories; etc.
• In other senses: information trees, branching decision trees, etc.

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a legacy for Tao - I

Angels Fear Revisited: Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Abstract Gregory Bateson intended his posthumous book Angels Fear as an approach to the scientific explanation of natural phenomena in the living world based on cybernetics that would not be so narrowly mechanistic that it triggers a fundamentalist reaction. This issue is newly urgent in the contemporary context of global religious conflict, resurgent fundamentalism, and the intelligent design debate. A redefinition of mind in terms of process and organization sufficient to analyze both evolution and learning, and an application of the Russellian theory of logical types to explanatory systems are central to his approach.

Keywords Gregory Bateson, evolution, intelligent design, mind, metamessages, systems theory, fundamentalism, cybernetics, double bind, schizophrenia, logical types

Introduction

The interdisciplinary conference brought together in Copenhagen in August 2005 by Professor Jesper Hoffmeyer was a fitting climax to the Gregory Bateson Centennial. First, because my father sought ways to make what he was saying accessible and useful to biologists, but second, because the broader interdisciplinary conversation was essential to preserve the weave of Gregory’s thinking. For biologists to discover what may be useful in his work it is necessary to consider writings that are primarily oriented to other disciplines, about, for instance, mental illness, where much of his thinking about communication can be found, or religion. Gregory regarded religions as efforts to understand the living world that might encode insights yet to be explored in other contexts, as exemplified in his comparison between Genesis, in which order is imposed on the natural world by god, and a New Guinea origin myth in which order is immanent in the material world and it is disorder that needs to be defeated. His primary approach, even in discussing matters that his colleagues declined to discuss, was as a scientist, but he regarded a sense of wonder at the natural world as a valuable corrective to the limitations of science.

Bateson’s Redefinition of Mind

The rule when Gregory began work as a scientist, as he expressed it, was perfectly clear: “in scientific explanation, there should be no use of mind or deity, and there should be no appeal to final causes. All causality should flow with the flow of time, with no effect of the future upon the present or the past. No deity, no teleology, and no mind should be postulated in the universe that was to be explained”.

The turning point for his thinking at the Macy conferences on cybernetics, was reflected in the title Warren McCulloch gave to the second conference in 1946: “Teleological Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems.” In that title there is already an expression of the particular epistemological exploration that engaged Gregory for the rest of his life: cybernetics could be looked at as a way of understanding what looks like final cause or purpose in systems where self-corrective feedback loops provide for an “effect of the future on the present.” If causation does not always flow with the flow of time, we need a way of talking about it without postulating an external agent or deity.

Because of this characteristic, particularly in living systems, Gregory defied taboo by redefining the word “mind” to refer to material systems so organized that they have the immanent capacity for self-correction. Gregory listed six “criteria of mental process” in Mind and Nature: “A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts… triggered by difference … requiring collateral energy …, [and] circular (or more complex) chains of determination … [resulting in] transforms (i.e. coded versions) of events … disclosing a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena”. I mention a seventh in Angels Fear that we discussed just before his death, the uneven distribution of information. He might have argued that this was entailed by one of the others but I put it forward because of his emphasis on the importance of parts of any system not having full information about other parts.

An examination of this list reveals that although Gregory is speaking of material systems dependent on physical energy, the process involves non-material abstractions and communication: triggering by difference, coding, and logical types.

meta-Tao sheets

The third metapattern introduced by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are sheets, patterns with bidimensional extension in space.

Background

As physical forms, sheets maximize transfer across surface areas, maximize surface area to volume ratio, and extend or grow two-dimensionally. In general terms, sheets represent capture, contact, and movement across a plane. In addition, when put together, they can form layers and can act as borders. Spheres and tubes can be made of sheets.

Two-dimensional layer crystals of carbon: structure of graphene.
Two-dimensional honeycomb hexagonal network of carbon atoms (spheres) on a plane. A monolayer of carbon atoms is called graphene, multiple layers of which form graphite.

Examples

• In science: leaves, surface tension, membranes, individual layers of the Earth and atmosphere, fins, airplane wings, skates and rays, films, snow coverage, etc.
• In architecture and design: walls, open areas as in large convention centers, fans and windmills, sails, turbines, etc.
• In art: canvas, shapes, etc.
• In social sciences: movement within a space, separation, etc.
• In other senses: clothing, rain coming down in sheets, bed coverings, parking lots, etc.

Space-time curvature in the presence of mass.

Oh Sheet! © Thomas Barbèy

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the system of Tao

The symbol traditionally associated to Tao or, more specifically, to the Teh del Tao - the knowable manifestation of it, is the Taijitu, commonly known as the Ying-Yang symbol, tied to the male/female duality but - more generally- representative of any opposite duality.
The historical association between the symbol and the Taoism, and to its main text - the Tao-Teh-Ching - is not clear, however it represents then completely in its simplest and most synthetic form.
Drawing the symbol can be made by drawing an external circle and two internal circles of half radius, erase the two semicircles on the opposite sides and coloring - usually by white and black - the two remaining parts:

Graphic drawing of the Taijitu symbol.

The symbol represents a polar duality between opposite elements, different and distinct, and describes in general the eastern traditional vision of the polar duality opposed to the western logical one:

Symbolic representation of polar dualities
according to logic western vision (left), intermediate (center) an eastern (right).

In the western vision of classical logic of greek origin, symbolized by the circle to the left, it is drawn a distinction through two opposite and symmetrical elements/processes which, by logical definition, are not mixable and that together describe the totality where the dual distinction is drawn. For example dualities like day/night, negative/positive, war/peace, femminine/masculine and so are composed by opposite elements or processes and completely described the reference context where they apply. The resulting vision is completely static ande binary.
A further improvement starts from the consideration that these dualities are processes, and as such are dynamical; the circle to the middle illustrates a more dynamical vision between the polar opposite processes of the duality.
In the Taijitu symbol the dynamical vision of the polar duality processes and elements reaches at the same time its maximum simplicity and dynamical complexity of representation. Not only the polar processes have a recursive but there's also an interaction between polar processes and elements, shown by the two circular dots internal to the process of opposite sign.
The Taijitu symbol may be considered as a system, and therefore analyzed in its systemic characteristics:

• System elements

They are symbolized by the two internal polar circles placed at the center of the symbol two semicircles, where the corresponding process of opposite sign reaches its maximum amplitude.

• System processes

They are symbolized by the two polar symmetrical recursive polar shapes which together divide the external circle of the symbol. The reppresented dynamic is  è both of process and between processes.

• Processes-elements interaction: system dynamics

The most complex feature of the symbol is the contemporary representation both of polar elements and processes, linked together through a specific dynamic.
At the point where an increasing process reaches its maximum and starts to decrease there's the presence of an element of opposite sign. This type of dynamics may be understood in different ways:
at the peak of its growth a process generates an element of opposite sign;
the presence of an element breaks the opposite sign process growth and makes it decreasing till reset;
lthe presence of an element induces an increasing process of the same sign which reduces the one of opposite sign;

• Process amplitude

To determine the process dynamic is necessary to compute its amplitude as a function of some evolution variable. To define them the following model is used:

Model to compute process amplitude for the Tao symbol.

within the external circle Cext of radius R one draws the red C1 and blue C2 circles with radius R/2. To define a coordinate which is always in the middle of the process the green C3 circle is used with the center moved to the left of R/4 and 3/4R radius. The upper green semicircle defines a radial coordinate which remains always central to the process and that may be assumed as its evolution coordinate s for the upper semicircle of the symbol. For the lower semicircle the central coordinate is a vertical line segment of length R/2 perpendicular to the horizontal axis from the circle C2 center to its border.
The process amplitude may be defined, for any coordinate s=angle*3/4R with angle that varies from 0 to 180 degrees, as the distance between the P1 intersection point of the C3 radius extension withe external circle Cext and the intersection point P2 of the C3 radius with the C1 circle. For any s value in the upper semicircle the P1-P2 segment is perpendicular to C3 and to compute it the sine and cosine theorems are applied on the triangles defined by P1 and P2, where two sides and one angle are known.
For the lower semicircle the amplitude calculation as a function of s is immediate and coincides with a decreasing quarter arc of circle function with radius R/2.
The result for a symbol circle with radius R=1 is:

Process amplitude as a function of evolution for a unitary radius circle.

The process starts from zero, reaches its maximum value R for a s value of 3/4πR and decreases as a quarter of circle to  zero at the value 3/4πR+R/2.
The progress for the two opposite symmetrical processes is:

Polar two-processes amplitude as a function of evolution for a unitary radius circle.

which repeats itself indefinitely radially rotating clockwisee, where the beginning of a process coincides with the other's maximum.
The recursion may be displayed also by drawing in a linear way the shapes of the opposite processes:

that seems a wave, though it is not since not sinusoidal but composed by alternate semicircles.

• System border: closure

The system border is the external circle Cext of radius R, which implies as the system dynamic is of the operational closure type. The two possible directions of rotation - clockwise and counterclockwise - are traditionally, like other symbols such the swastika, associated to a further polar duality - creative if clockwise, destructive if counterclockwise -.

• System matrix

It is represented by the infinite plane external to the symbol and represents, in a necessary metaphorical way, the indescribable and unknowable Tao which the emergent symbol is the Teh:

- 25 -

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

It flows through all things,

inside and outside, and returns

to the origin of all things.

The Tao is great.

The universe is great.

Earth is great.

Man is great.

These are the four great powers.

Man follows the earth.

Earth follows the universe.

The universe follows the Tao.

The Tao follows only itself.